Currently optically guided missiles are guided by electrical control signals supplied via a wire which is coupled between the launcher and the missile during its flight. Because of obvious deficiencies in this type of guidance system, it is desirable to provide guidance for an optically guided missile having no physical connection between the launcher and missile during flight. Conventional terminal homing missiles are inadequate for this purpose because of their relatively high cost and complexity.
Beam guided missiles reduce such complexity. Typical beam guided techniques nutate the images of multiple lasers and project them through a zoom lens. To encode space in this manner is very inefficient in that it requires an excessive amount of laser pulses for each receiver position sample.
Also the use of zoom lenses is to be avoided if at all possible since the multi-element zoom lenses will be subjected to shock and vibration necessitating that highly complex and costly system modifications be employed to correct boresight changes in the critical imaging portion of the beam projector.